Recounts the life and career of Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlic in the
form of a lexicon of film terms tied to anecdotes spanning Grlic's
life.
"I read a lot this year. Old, new, borrowed, blue. This was the best.
The paradox of reading something so avidly that you can't put it down
and then I got to the last 20 pages slowing down to a snail's pace and
reading so slowly so that it wouldn't be over so quickly."--Mike Downey,
European Film Academy
From his post-Nazi-era childhood in Yugoslavia to his college years
during the 1968 invasion of Prague, the Yugoslav dissolution wars, and
his subsequent exile in the United States, these personal stories
combine to provide insight into socialist film industries,
contextualizing south Slavic film while also highlighting its contacts
with Western filmmakers and film industry.
From the introduction by Aida Vidan:
The one hundred and seventy-seven film terms provide sometimes a direct
and at other times a metaphoric path to Grlic's stories and concurrently
serve as a self-referential mechanism to comment on a series of film
attributes. The entries can be read in any order, allowing for the
reader's own "montage" of the book's universe.... Grlic adroitly
captures the absurdities and paradoxes in one's life resulting from the
sort of tectonic shifts with which East European history abounds.